


and memory itself

by livinglaughinglove



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug, Kara Danvers is Not Okay, Kara Danvers is an Alien, POV Kara Danvers, Self-Discovery, but sometimes that means a lot more than having super-powers, we all know that, we know that too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 10:27:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18259415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livinglaughinglove/pseuds/livinglaughinglove
Summary: 'There’s a panicky feeling she gets sometimes, that starts below her diaphragm and claws its way up through her lungs and wraps around her throat. It’s a kind of sickness, like too much adrenalin and too little sleep.'Or,Kara, Krypton, and the space in between.





	and memory itself

**Author's Note:**

> Canon and I have a very particular acquaintance - in that I can only stand it when around others, and even then I tend to blur the edges anyway. So, my particular version is a tad muddled, like the mint and brown sugar at the bottom of a mojito in some hipster bar. (Not that I frequent hipster bars. Much.)
> 
>  
> 
> Here, Mon-El does not exist, and neither does any kind of plot. Hope that suits. Title is from a poem called 'The Lost Land', by Eavan Boland, which is both beautiful and sad.
> 
>  
> 
> Finally, something of a content warning: in this fic there are allusions to/descriptions of panic attacks, anxiety, and depression; and descriptions of thoughts and feelings and semi-phobias related to the questioning of self, sexuality, and identity. If you feel those things might be triggering or upsetting to you, you might want to consider giving this story a miss. Please keep yourselves well, comfortable, and happy.

There’s a panicky feeling she gets sometimes, that starts below her diaphragm and claws its way up through her lungs and wraps around her throat. It’s a kind of sickness, like too much adrenalin and too little sleep.

It’s the kind of thing that pushes her out of bed and up through the clouds, flying as fast as she can without breaking the sound barrier, lest she wake the sleeping residents of National City long before the work day starts.

Kara hangs in the air some miles above the Earth’s surface, breathing heavily despite not exerting herself in the slightest. The world is dark around her, the city lights too far from her lonely pedestal, the stars not close enough to touch.

The feeling has her insides in a stranglehold, has her gasping. Something inside her is screaming and she can’t hear anything, she _can’t hear—_

A heart beats in the blackness, warm and safe, and Kara lets herself drift back down to Earth.

 

-

 

“…Super…re you..kay?” Kara can feel her head floating to the surface of a lukewarm pool, the light becoming stronger as she moves up, up, up, and suddenly the air is cold and dry around her as she opens her eyes.

“Mm— whaa?” Her mumble is mostly lost to the fur inside her mouth, and she takes the proffered glass of water before she tries again. “What did you say?”

“I asked,” said a smiling Vasquez, “if you were okay. Looks like you took a bit of a nap.” Kara blinks, before flicking her eyes left and then right, finding herself in the breakroom of the DEO. It’s…surprising, in the oddest way. It feels like— wasn’t she somewhere else?

“Oh yeah,” she grins, “I’m fine. Punching aliens must have caught up with me.”

She let the smile trespass on her face until the agent leaves, before it drops like a wet rag.

 _Aliens_. The word felt – _feels_ – foreign in her mouth. She knows what it means, of course. Other, or unfamiliar. Disturbing. Distasteful. She knows it’s what humans use to define things they don’t understand.

She sometimes hates that she uses it. Hates that she uses it to refer to her own family, self, culture. Hates that she still thinks, some days, that it is a better descriptor for humans than she could ever come up with herself.

 

-

 

There are times when Kara wakes up and the room is unfamiliar. There are corners where there should be curves, creams and yellows where there should be white, and the light is different, wrong—

 

-

 

Kara can’t remember every detail of the run up to her senior prom, but the dressing room at the nth store Alex had dragged her into is burned into her brain, the residue like so much ash and scar tissue.

“Oh,” Alex had said with a soft smile, awkward knees and shoulders and trying hard to be enthusiastic for the both of them. “That one looks lovely.”

There was a mirror to Kara’s left, and the movement it captured drew her eyes to the glass. Inside, there was a girl with golden hair tumbling haphazardly down her back and glasses glued to the bridge of her nose. She was wearing a dress that came to just below her knees, soft pink fabric cinched in at the waist before flaring out, capped sleeves and a sweetheart neckline. It _was_ pretty. It really was. Every magazine, commercial, movie – they would say it was pretty. _Alex_ said it looked lovely.

It felt wrong.

It felt like she was trying to fit into someone else’s skin, only it didn’t fit. She was contorting herself and stretching and hurting, but it just wouldn’t work. Her trachea was stuck to the inside of her neck, and if she tried to free it, it would tear and crumble to dust. Even the material, although soft, made her burn and itch, made her shake, made the middle of her back ache and heat press at the back of her eyes.

It wasn’t _right_. It should be white, not— and it shouldn’t look like— and it wasn’t— and it was just _wrong_.

She pasted a wide smile on and said “Yeah,” and Alex smiled back.

 

-

 

“What do you think,” Winn gets out around a mouthful of doughnut, “we should do about Alex?” They’re alone at his workstation, lights low and the murmur of the night crew as white noise.

“What about Alex?”

“I mean,” and he waves his confection around a little, tilting his head and looking up, and then back down again. “Does she want like a coming out party, or more of a ‘hey, you’re gay’ shower, or…?” Kara blinks, then laughs.

“I think if you suggested even one of those to her, she’d stick you in with the rest of the newbies doing press-ups.” He makes a face, and she makes one back. “Nothing has changed, it’s just— new.”

Winn turns back to his monitor with a _hmph_ , but Kara stays staring into the space his head had occupied. There’s something about her last sentence that rankles, doesn’t quite fit, and it takes her a moment to work out what.

Because really, something _has_ changed. Not Alex, not her wonderful if over-protective sister, not even Kara’s perception of her. Something a little more complicated than that.

She’s always found that understanding the world around her is easier if it was first filtered through Alex. In its pure, undiluted form, it’s often too much to handle, especially so when she was younger. It helped if her sister was there, not quite as a buffer, but as a coloured lense for her to focus on. She remembers a kid in high school who had an orange piece of plastic he’d read books through, and perhaps it was something like that.

It feels like a lot of things have been chipping away at that plastic recently. Maybe too many. Kara is unmoored in a way that she hasn’t been since waking up to see a strange man standing over her, bearing her family crest and greeting her in a warped version of her language. It isn’t Kal’s fault, not really, and it isn’t Alex’s either.

But, that orange piece of plastic gets smaller and smaller, even as the screaming in her head gets louder.

 

-

 

Late at night she lies in bed, listening to a heart beating somewhere, and wonders if there’s something in her ship or at the DEO that will help. If it could make her different, change her brain and make her more like Alex again– well, wouldn’t that be better? They could help each other again. Be closer. See the world in the same way.

It doesn’t matter, of course, because there is nothing in the known universe that could do something like that. She is just Kara Danvers, whatever that means, and Kara Danvers she’ll have to stay.

(And Kara Danvers is not…she’s not like that anyway. She can’t be.)

 

-

 

Lena Luthor invites her for brunch a lot, Kara notices. Makes plans and schedules excuses to see her, even if it’s just for a quick coffee between conference calls. She thinks Lena likes the company and likes having someone to talk to that isn’t often in her ‘CEO sphere’ and all that entails.

It’s…nice. Talking with Lena is nice. Kara comes away from their meet-ups with a smile more often than not, cheeks perhaps still stained with pink from laughing so hard, or from one of Lena’s careless little flatteries.

Lena does that a lot too. Says things or does things that make Kara happy. Like all those flowers. They were a little unnecessary, but a part of her _likes_ that Lena had gone out of her way like that. She tries to remember the last time she’d felt like this and her mind automatically goes to…

If she looks up through the ceiling from her desk at CatCo, and a little to the left, she can see James Oleson in his office.

 

-

 

A pair of red lips curving around the word that is her name wakes from her doze on the sofa, and Lena laughs softly.

“It’s just me,” she murmurs, “no need to worry.” Lena has her feet pulled up off the floor and tucked around her, tight and small in a space that is big enough for two at the opposite end of the couch. “I just wanted to wake you up to say goodbye. It’s late, and I need to—”

“You can stay.” The thought is out of her mouth before she can process it, a garbled, barely coherent mess of syllables, and she’s not sure if all of them are English. “I mean,” she coughs. “You can stay. If you want.”

Light lids close over green eyes.

“Only if it’s no trouble.”

“Not at all. You can take the bed, and in the morning, we’ll do a proper breakfast.” Kara grins, and Lena hesitantly returns the smile.

“Alright then.”

 

-

 

Kara has forgotten when she stopped thinking in Kryptonian.

 

-

 

She’s forgotten a lot of things.

 

-

 

Using her powers has never really made her feel connected to— to Krypton. She couldn’t lift a building there. Couldn’t warm her drink with a look. Couldn’t brush the thought of the stars with her fingertips. Couldn’t hear the heartbeat that makes her feel safe.

Instead, they make her feel both connected to her new world, and so desperately alone.

 

-

 

Kara calls Kal up one evening, and he answers with a warm hello and she can feel his smile from across the country. They talk about work, about their _other_ work, and about temperamental bosses until Kara asks a question in the silence. He doesn’t quite understand, so she repeats herself.

“Can you miss something you’ve never known?”

His quiet “yes” makes something inside her shift.

“And,” she is hesitant for another reason now. “What about something you might know? Something down the line that you’re waiting for without realising it.”

“I think,” he says slowly, deliberately. “That’s called possibility.”

She hears that heartbeat again, louder this time. That something shifts again and clicks into place, and all she has to do is turn her head to be able to see the dying sun reflecting off the glass _L_.

 

-

 

“I’m sorry, you might have to explain that one to me,” Kara says with a laugh, and Lena sighs good-naturedly down the phone.

The thing is- Kara knows more about the mechanics of the universe than just about anyone living on earth at this moment, Lena included. Krypton was incredibly advanced, even in Galactic standards, and well, not everyone was invited to join the Science Guild at thirteen. This _playing dumb_ act though – it’s not just a ruse, not all of it.

Some of the concepts Lena talks about are recognisable, so there’s certainly an element of…deception, but others are so underdeveloped here that Kara can hardly grasp or understand what her friend is trying to explain. It would be like asking Lena to work a telegraph machine without a manual. Or, well, that’s probably not the best example. She thinks Lena could do just about anything if she set her mind to it.

The other issue, the one Kara doesn’t like to think about as much, is that mathematics may be a universal language _on Earth_ , but that sentiment doesn’t quite leave the little green planet. The numbers themselves are easy, but the ideas? The way thoughts are communicated? Direct translations are meaningless when the words are invented by a different species to describe a specific understanding of an event through a unique lense.

Kara is so _clever_ , but only in a language that is no longer spoken, that is no longer _alive_.

 

-

 

(Kara can call Eliza _mom_ sometimes because when she thinks of her mother, the word she reaches for is not the same.)

 

-

 

Perhaps that’s why she likes listening to Lena so much though – because with every smiling, careful explanation, Kara reclaims a little piece of her own history, a magpie lining its nest with sparkling shards of glass. She can understand again, and although it will never be the same, it helps.

And, well. The way Lena laughs, the way her mouth wraps around words like _entanglement_? Those are pretty neat things too.

 

-

 

Everything about Lena is pretty neat.

 

-

 

J’onn finds Kara on the balcony one morning, the sun throwing red, red streaks across the sky as it struggles over the horizon. Her arms are a vice around her shins, knees tucked under her chin and toes tight beneath her.

“You are troubled,” he says, question swapped for calm statement as he places his hands on the rail and wraps his fingers around the bar, one by one. He’s not looking at her, and Kara doesn’t know whether that makes it better or worse.

“One hundred and fifty seven years ago,” he continues before she can form a response, “I forgot the shape of M’yri’ah’s smile.”

Kara pretends the sunrise is the reason why she closes her stinging eyes.

 

-

 

She dreams of a shaking council chamber, a plant around her chest, and _please come back to us Kara please_ , and wakes up gasping on the sofa.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” Alex says from the kitchen, teaspoon clinking softly against the side of a blue porcelain mug. “After all that fuss about it being your night to pick, you missed the end of _Legally Blonde_.”

She looks at Kara then, and perhaps she sees something new in the mussed hair and cheeks still pink with the brush of sleep, because she lays down the spoon very carefully.

“I’m okay,” Kara says automatically, but they both know that’s a lie.

Alex crosses the space between them with her brand of forceful grace and wedges herself between the sofa arm and her sister. The mug of hot chocolate is handed over, no temperature warning required. “Talk,” Alex murmurs.

The drink in Kara’s hand is still spinning slightly, the circular motion getting slower and slower as each minute goes by.

“I like Lena,” she says, staring into the chocolatey abyss.

“I know,” Alex replies.

“No,” Kara shifts, turning her body towards her sister, who looks backs at her with love, acceptance. “I _like_ Lena.”

“I _know_ ,” Alex grins, and they’re both laughing, and Kara can’t breathe in the best, best way.

(Alex tells her the next day, _we can shop for flannel if you like,_ and they both wrinkle their noses and grimace and smile.)

 

-

 

Lena’s eyes widen in shock-hope-wonder when Kara asks her to dinner, and her “yes” is nearly lost in her heartbeat, her kiss. It’s not the same as the way Rao’s light used to refract through the Jewel mountains, but it’s almost like it.

(And it finally feels like  _almost_ is enough.)

**Author's Note:**

> Drop by my tumblr if you feel like it! I'm at livinglaughinglove there also.


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